“How little?” Xavier asked.
“I think I was three or four. It was at our last house, in the city.” I hadn’t thought of Sarah for years. “She was bigger than me, all glamorous and adventurous. We’d spend the whole day together. We used to dress in matching out fits.”
“At four?”
“Yeah. I guess it was her idea. But other than her, you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had.”
“Didn’t you get invited to a sleepover the other day?”
“Polly only invited me because her mom was trying to get a promotion.”
“What?”
“Her parents work for UniCorp.”
“Oh,” said Xavier. “Well, so do mine.”
“True . . . but we’ve been friends forever. Almost as long as you’ve been alive,” I reminded him.
Xavier turned back to his box. “Do you ever think how it’s weird?” he asked. “I mean, you haven’t grown up the same way I do. I remember when you used to tower over me, and you told me stories because I couldn’t read yet. Now we’re like the same height. Almost the same age.”
“I’m fourteen!” I said indignantly, and pulled myself up to my full height, which was still a few centimeters taller than him. “You’re only eleven.”
He looked at me rather pointedly. “My birthday was three months ago. I’m twelve.”
I blinked. I’d been out of stasis for over a month. I hadn’t realized my last stint had been so long. “I missed it? Really?”
“Really.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll get you something to make up for it. What do you want?”
Xavier’s eyes searched my face. He hesitated for a long time before he said,
“Nothing.”
“No, really.”
“No, really, nothing. I just wish you could have been there. That would have been the best present.”
I smiled. “You’re sweet.”
“Don’t tell anyone; I’ll never live it down.”
I touched his shoulder anyway. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Mom’s taking me to the art supply store and then to the furniture designer. I’m out of burnt sienna.”
“Oh.” He looked disappointed. “I was kinda hoping you’d stay and help me wire this into the door key.”
I looked mock horrified. “You want to start a fire? I couldn’t figure out a circuit if my life depended on it!”
“But the threat of exploding wall sockets adds so much more excitement to the project!” He laughed.
I shook my head. “I’ll just jinx you. Besides, I’d miss giving my opinion on color wheels. Mom’s redecorating the front lobby, and she wants my help.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Xavier said. He turned back to his new holographic dog circuit.
Something bothered me. I wondered if Xavier knew I was going back into stasis soon. “Ahm . . . I wanted to tell you. Mom and Daddy are going on to Luna next week.”
Xavier’s head snapped toward me, his eyes wide. “For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
He stared at me openmouthed for a moment before he composed his face.
“Well. Just don’t miss my next birth-day, okay?”
I reached forward to ruffle his blond hair. “Not for anything, Xavy.”
He blushed. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not. But you are my best friend.”
The holographic Afghan barked. “Girl’s best friend,” Xavier said, and then he barked, too.
Now I had a new best friend. He wasn’t anything like as good as Xavier, but he was the best I could have had under the circumstances.
Zavier’s real name, according to the information sheet I found in the kitchen, was Freefoot’s Desert Roads, and he was a retired champion, having come an inch away from Best in Show three years before. He was well trained in general obedience and had a smattering of rudimentary guard training. He had a regularly scheduled grooming every two weeks. It was suggested that I give him a light once- over every day with a brush I found along with his papers. I asked him if he preferred Roads or Desert, or a dozen other combinations of his show name, but he didn’t prick his ears at any of them. His call name must have been something entirely different, and I had no note of it, so Zavier was as good a name as any.
Patty and Barry were obviously expecting Zavier, as Barry came home with a bag of dog food. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they had arranged for me to have him or if it was Mr. Guillory. But it didn’t matter. Zavier was mine now.
That night, he curled up at the foot of my bed and kept my feet warm.
Unfortunately, he didn’t quite keep the nightmares away.
The nightmares were relentless. They had been coming almost every night, ever since I came out of stass. In my dreams I walked through long, empty hallways.
At first they were the corridors between the apartments at Unicorn, but the night I got Zavier, they were the halls at Uni Prep, complete with neo- Gothic windows and stone arches. Always there were mirrors around, confusing and frightening. I would catch movement and turn to see what caused it, to find it was only me, looking back at myself. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in these empty hall-ways, but I was afraid to find it.
Like always, I woke in a cold sweat, shouting for my mom. But the moment I fully awoke and realized she wasn’t there, I was glad. She’d have been ashamed of me, calling out like an undisciplined child.
“Would she really have been ashamed?” asked Dr. Bija the next morning. We’d had a special session scheduled for the morning of my second day at school, so that I could talk over what the first day had been like. When Mina had asked how I’d slept, I’d slipped up and told her about the dreams.
“Probably,” I said. “Mom always kept herself composed. It’s best if you can re fine yourself, so that people will only see perfection when they look at you.
That’s what she said.”
Mina frowned. “Do you think anyone can really be perfect?”
I shrugged. “Like a statue, I think. If you can file off the parts that are rough, eventually you’ll have a personality like Michelangelo’s David.”
She laughed. “Do you really think you have the power to file off your nightmares, like you would your fingernails?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. I wished I could.
“So, how did school go yesterday?” Mina prompted.
I shrugged. “I don’t understand anything.”
“It’s only your first day. But I wasn’t talking about your academic performance.
Do you have any friends?”
“Not really. Well, Bren, I guess.”
“Bren?”
“Brendan Sabah? His grandfather’s apparently Guillory’s second or something.”
“Ah, yes. I remember from the press conference. Do you like him?”
“He let me sit with him at lunch.”
“That must be a comfort,” she said. “It’s good to have friends.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure that the relationship I had with Bren was exactly that of friendship. It wasn’t anything like what I’d had with Xavier, even before we started dating, and I hadn’t had any friends outside of Xavier, so I had no other point of comparison. All I knew was that I needed Bren badly, but I didn’t feel as comfortable around him as I had with Xavier. That left me with a confused, unbalanced feeling that I wasn’t sure I liked. Though I did like Bren. A lot.
I left the session trying to figure out exactly what it was with Bren. I wasn’t sure I knew. But at the very least, Bren did treat me with friendly deference. I was glad. I badly needed a friendly face later that day, after my history class.
Bren caught me in the hallway as I fled, unexcused, from the horrors I had been learning in this second class. Yesterday, hearing about the preparations for the Dark Times had made me feel terrible enough. But today, as the Dark Times themselves loomed larger and larger on the wall screen, I shrank smaller and smaller, until I had to get out of there. I ran past Bren without seeing him, without seeing anything. “Rose!” His voice echoed in the otherwise empty hallway. “You all right?”
I whirled.
“Hey, what is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Ghosts. That’s all that was left of my family, my friends, my Xavier. I choked on bile, looking desperately around the halls. There, a garbage incinerator! I stuck my head over the pan and vomited, losing the few precious morsels of food I’d managed to choke down over lunch.
For a few moments I retched alone, and then I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” said Bren. “Should I get you to the nurse?”
I spat some of the vomit taste out of my mouth. “No,” I said. I pulled back from the pan. “I’m not sick.” I began digging through my pockets, hoping for a tissue.
Bren pulled one from the necessary dispensers on the wall. I blew my nose with the proffered square and then threw it onto the pan. I pressed the button on the side, and the pan disappeared into the lower con fines of the incinerator, replaced by a fresh one. I could hear the quiet hum that meant the incinerator was destroying all evidence of my weakness.
Sickness past, all I felt was overwhelming grief. “You want to tell me what that was about?” Bren asked. “Was it lunch? You still suffering stass fatigue?”
“No. Well, yes, but that wasn’t it.” Another wave of nausea hit, but I suppressed it. “Why didn’t anyone tell me how bad the Dark Times were?”
“We didn’t?” Bren looked confused. “I thought Reggie told you.”
“He told me some,” I said. “But I don’t think it registered.” Between the stass residue and the shock, nothing had seemed to touch me at the time.
The tales this afternoon, of whole towns perishing in agony, of people waking up one morning perfectly healthy and being dead by the afternoon, the loss of infrastructure, which made everything worse . . .
Bren still looked confused. “What brought all this on?”
“History class,” I said. “They’re talking about how my parents died. How all my friends died. My boyfriend.”
Understanding softened Bren’s face. “Oh,” he said. He looked a bit awkward for a moment and then said, “You want to talk about it?”
I sighed. “No. But I don’t . . .”
“What?”
I was embarrassed, but I said it anyway. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Bren’s brow furrowed. He put his hand on my shoulder, a heated weight to anchor me to the earth. “You’re not alone,” he said, his voice a velvet cushion.
“Come on, let’s get you some air.”
“Don’t you need to be in class?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I wasn’t about to argue with him. With his hand on my shoulder, he led me outside to the quad, where he sat me down on a bench under a weeping cherry tree, the flowers just blooming in the spring air. The gentle scent and the slight chill did wash away my nausea. Bren sat beside me, watching me with those eyes like new leaves. I wanted to bury myself in his chest and weep for a hundred years, but I didn’t.
“Is there anything I can get you?” he asked. “You need some water or something?”
“No.”
There was an awkward silence. “Anything I can do?”
I hesitated. I knew what he could do, but I wasn’t sure he’d want to do it.
“Anything,” he prompted, sensing my indecision.
“Tell me about the Dark Times,” I said.
66 –
He frowned. “Arrre . . . you sure?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’d rather hear it from a friend.” Then I realized what I’d said. “You are a friend, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” he said brusquely. “Okay.” He scratched his head. “Where should I start?”
“She was talking . . . talking about the plague hitting first in New York,”
Bren nodded. “Apparently some American fashion guru decided that the next great thing in furs was marmot, so he headed off to China to collect as much as he could. His name was Marcus Alexios. He came back from China carrying a septicemic variant of plague. New York being New York, he hopped on the subway, went to the show, and then dropped dead.
“Apparently marmots carry plague. Who’d comm that? Usually plague is spread only through blood contact, but two little protein shifts had turned. Which meant that everyone Alexios worked with in China, everyone on the plane to America with him, everyone in that crowded subway station, and all the affluent fashion elite who had been at the show were all exposed. His autopsy wasn’t performed until after all of those people were let loose on the public.
One person got on a plane to LA, one guy went to a homeless shelter in the East Village, one woman went on a train to Vermont, and you can guess how it all spread from there.”
Bren was watching me, and I knew my face had gone white. “I’ll skip the details,” Bren told me, and I was grateful. “Now, they had medicine that could cure this plague, though it was resistant and stockpiles were low. But the transportation needed to ship them was out of commission. With a third of the population sick, nothing worked. By the time medicine got to any given community, most of the people were already dead.” He gazed at me. “It was usually pretty quick, they say,” he said, trying to reassure me. “Scary, apparently, but they didn’t have time to suffer.”
I covered my eyes, trying to compose myself. “Right.”
He took a deep breath. This must have been ancient history to Bren, but telling me about it seemed awkward for him. “The plague swept through one summer, then it kept resurfacing. Later outbreaks were less widespread, but it could still be transmitted by human to human contact and by fleas. Meanwhile, tuberculosis was still spreading. You knew about the TB?”
“Yes,” I said. “They had control clinics for it when . . . before.”
Bren grimaced. “Yeah, those mandatory collections of people from all walks of life didn’t help when it came to containing the plague. People would show up to get tested for TB, and come home half- exed from plague. It was strange.
Everyone was so shocked that the problem hadn’t come from some new disease but from the old diseases that everyone had neglected to prepare for.” He sighed. “Then came the final blow.”
I started, horrified. “There’s more?” How could there be more?
“Yeah,” Bren said. “Infertility. They tell you about the Global Food Initiative?”
“Yes, that was before I was stassed. The mass distribution of high- yield seeds to countries suffering food shortages. Daddy was involved in that.”
When the century- long ban on genetically modified foods was lifted, my parents had taken me to a ceremonial banquet in their honor. UniCorp had developed many of those GM seeds. Mom and Daddy were thrilled to be included in the Global Food Initiative and lobbied extensively for its instigation.
“Biggest lawsuit UniCorp ever had to deal with,” said Bren. “Nearly sank the company, Granddad says. Apparently one of the seeds, a type of corn, was genetically modified as what is known as a ‘terminator seed,’ which means the crops won’t produce viable seed next year.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s good for business. It means the farmers have to keep coming back for fresh seed from the company. Daddy restructured the patents after they rescinded the ban of 2087.”
“And everyone wishes he hadn’t.”
“Was it too hard to transport fresh seed after the population decreased?”
“Well . . . that didn’t help, but no, the problem was in an unexpected mutation.
That’s the real reason they banned genetic modification, you know. In the end, the risk outweighed the rewards. It was just too dangerous. The terminator gene passed into the bloodstream and affected humans. Particularly males. It resulted in short- lived sperm, like, one or two hours’ life span. Which meant that unless a guy was getting it off pretty regularly, the sperm would die and he’d be shooting blanks. And even if he wasn’t, if a woman’s egg wasn’t ready and waiting, panting at the edge of the cervix, the sperm didn’t have a prayer of reaching it before it sang the final dirge and exed.”
It was so gruesome and macabre that I was surprised I laughed, but I did. I’d been right: hearing about this from a friend did make it all easier to process.
Bren shrugged. “No one commed before the plague. People had been postponing pregnancy, and it wasn’t that surprising that women from the age of thirty- eight to forty- five were somehow unable to conceive during the brief window they allowed themselves. But after so much death, everyone felt justified in having children, and it turned out that most people couldn’t. We had lost so many, and we couldn’t build the population back up. The killer corn had gone into the general food supply, and it mixed with everything, which meant it was everywhere. It was fed to livestock, which meant the livestock wouldn’t reproduce either. That resulted in more food shortages.”
Bren shook his head. “Everything spiraled downhill. There were riots, resource wars, technology wars. TB was still raging, and the plague kept coming back.
Nothing really started coming together for about twenty years.”
“Is that all of it?”
“Yeah, pretty much. War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death showed up, got on their horses, played a little polo, and then headed back into the ether to wait for the next apocalypse.” He held his arms wide. “And we’re all still here.”
“How?” I asked. “How could the human race survive all that?”
“Intervention, preparation, those handful of people in any population who are immune to some disease or other. Once the worst of it had calmed down, people were able to focus on how to repair the damage. My grandmother had to be externally fertilized to have my mom and her brother, and it was apparently, like, the fourth time my grandma tried before the embryos took. Glad they did, or I wouldn’t be here. But with enough persistence, anything can start to grow again.”
“I guess all you have to do is survive,” I said quietly. My parents hadn’t. Åsa hadn’t. My Xavier hadn’t. “I don’t think I can go back into that class, though,” I said. “Today was just the overview. She’s going to go into each mistake and tragedy in depth, and I just can’t take it.”